The performance artist has made a career out of enduring the kind of physical and mental torment that would make any person's toes curl

At 63, performance artist Marina Abramovic is impossible not to gawk at—and not only because she's the Helen Mirren of the art world, with a smoking body and long, glossy hair that inspires awe and envy in women a third her age. For nearly four decades, Abramovic has mesmerized audiences, fellow artists, critics, and even pythons with her live performances, in which she uses her body alternately as subject, canvas, and tool. The performance pieces she created in the mid-'70s notoriously involved pain and self-mutilation: She cut a pentagram into her abdomen, flagellated herself with a whip, and then lay on ice blocks (all in one work: Thomas Lips, named after an ex-flame); stabbed her fingers as part of a knife game; and took medication for schizophrenics that caused her to go into a stupor. "I understood that the human being is afraid of two things: pain and dying," Abramovic says, by way of explaining subject matter that on the page can sound shocking and disturbingly masochistic. "Every artist deals with these issues using different media and tools—I use the body."

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We're talking in her stylish SoHo apartment, and although Abramovic caught a cold flying from India two days ago (she spent a month at an ayurvedic retreat there), she radiates glamour and verve. In a strong Slavic accent, the artist says that her early acts were meant to be transformative for her as well as her audience. "The energy of the public helped me to go through this. At the same time, I become a mirror for the public: If I can do this, then maybe they can deal with the pain in their own life. Once you understand you can control the pain, then you stop having fear of pain."

So does anything still scare her? She has a "primordial fear" of sharks, she says, and then every new performance she embarks on: "For me, the most difficult piece is the one I'm about to make."

The piece currently striking terror in her heart is part of a retrospective of her work opening at New York's Museum of Modern Art in March, a show that has the potential to introduce her to a new generation. A corps of 35 artists will stage five pieces from her career, and in a riff on the show's title, "The Artist Is Present," Abramovic herself will sit silently at a table in the museum's atrium, allowing visitors to take the seat across from hers for as long as they choose (or until closing time, at least). "I'm just having gaze, that's all," says Abramovic, likening her presence in the bustling space to the calm eye of a tornado. "It's up to me to create charismatic space."

That shouldn't be difficult for her. In 2002, when Abramovic lived for 12 days without eating or talking in a large, wall-mounted diorama (outfitted with a toilet, shower, and bed), she brought audience members and some critics to tears with only her stare. In the new work, "You sit down and become part of the art," says MoMA curator Klaus Biesenbach. "The viewer [learns] art is not often what you expect it to be."

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The daughter of Communists, Abramovic grew up under Titoism in the former Yugoslavia. Her mother ran the government agency responsible for monuments and public art. But even as a student studying painting at Belgrade's Academy of Fine Arts, Abramovic says she strained to break free of the canvas and studio and, as one of her contemporaries said, "put life in art."

In 1975, the year she first performed Thomas Lips, Abramovic met Uwe Laysiepen ("Ulay"), a German photographer and artist who would become her partner in work and life. Their art focused less on personal violence and more on interdependency: In ­Relation in Space, they ran at and into each other, naked, the slaps recorded by microphones. In Imponderabilia, they stood as nude sentries in the doorway of an Italian museum, forcing visitors to choose which artist to face while squeezing between them (the polizia deemed the performance obscene and shut it down after an hour). For 12 years, Ulay/Abramovic lived what she now calls an "amazing life." They slept in their van, performed all over Europe, camped for a year with aboriginals in the Australian outback, met with the Dalai Lama in India. "We had a big love story!" she says. Their grandest—and most poignant—piece was their last: Starting at opposite ends of the Great Wall of China in 1988, they walked toward each other for three months. Their original plan had been to marry when they reached the center. But the relationship had been crumbling, and instead of tying the knot, they severed it. (Abramovic would later marry an Italian sculptor 16 years her junior. They were together for 12 years but recently divorced.)

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After her split from Ulay, Abramovic returned to performing solo but struggled to reclaim her creative autonomy. "With Ulay, he would come with ideas, I would come with ideas, and then we'd make something that didn't look like either of our ideas," she says. "It was so hard for me to go back to my own work because I was thinking that two people could achieve more than one." But Abramovic once more turned to the audience as collaborator, creating pieces that demanded monklike levels of concentration and endurance. She let pythons slither curiously around her head; she ate a large raw onion like an apple while monologuing; she maniacally scrubbed a skeleton.

Though she's definitely more diva than dowager, Abramovic has referred to herself as the "grandmother of performance art": To highlight the difficulties in preserving an art form that is ephemeral by definition, she staged a show in 2005 at NYC's Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum that involved reperforming some of the most infamous works of the '60s and '70s, including Vito Acconci's Seedbed, which required her to hide under a stage while masturbating and fantasizing into a microphone about the museum visitors who walked above her.

Although Abramovic has been featured in feminist art retrospectives—and once performed a piece in which she combed her hair until her scalp bled, intoning, "Art must be beautiful. Artist must be beautiful"—she doesn't consider herself a feminist artist. When she performed with Ulay, the couple didn't use their nude bodies to underline differences between men and women so much as to spotlight human power and vulnerability. Yet, interestingly, Ulay found his gender—or his own less-padded anatomy—to be an obstacle in the couple's series Nightsea Crossing (the inspiration for the new MoMA piece), in which they faced each other across a long table, not moving, eating, or breaking eye contact for eight hours at a time. Ulay found sitting for long stretches almost unbearable, according to a new biography of Abramovic by James Westcott, and on one occasion, the pain from a swollen spleen prompted him to get up from the table prematurely, leaving Abramovic to stare at his empty chair. The pair performed this grueling piece 90 times over five years, and Westcott writes that it "opened, or exposed, a chasm not only in their fundamental physical constitutions and capabilities, but in their psyches and ambitions."

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The physical and mental toll of making such pieces is one reason that almost none of Abramovic's contemporaries are still performing today. Another is that performance art is hard to monetize—how do you put a dollar value on a fleeting experience?—but Abramovic has stuck with it. It's as if she can't help herself. "I do life," is how she explains her art. "All my inspiration comes from life. That's how it never stops, in a way." She also teaches workshops to cultivate new talent and has managed to stage works that yield striking (and strikingly salable) photographs. Her human diorama piece was preserved in pop culture history when she permitted it to be depicted on an episode of Sex and the City. (She says she was amused rather than offended at how the mass media "caricatures" performance art.)

Notably, Abramovic declined to perform the piece herself. "In theater, the actor is playing somebody else; he's playing his emotions. The theater knife doesn't hurt, and blood is just a color. In a performance, everything is real: real emotions with real situations, and real person."

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For someone who has spent much of her career wearing not a stitch of clothing, Abramovic is surprisingly obsessed with fashion. She wants to show me her gigantic walk-in closet: pink carpeting, floor-to-ceiling shelves, endless racks of slinky black dresses. "Riccardo Tisci for me is the most inventive designer of the moment," she says. Givenchy boxes fill the closet; three more that just arrived are stacked on the living room floor. "I was never interested in fashion until after I walked the Chinese Wall. Before then, I felt like I couldn't dress up, no lipstick, no nail polish." Abramovic slips away to use the toilet but continues talking through the wide-open door. "After the Wall, I didn't need to prove to my audience that I'm a good artist. But in my private life I felt fat, ugly, and unwanted. I started to be interested in fashion, and I increasingly felt better." I hear a flush, and she dashes out to apply makeup for her lunch meeting.

Performance art has always been an alternative art that hinges on the unexpected, the surprise of seeing private acts corrupted, refashioned, or aggrandized in public. How does Abramovic preserve the wow factor in the age of YouTube and iEverythings? "Documentation, photographs, video—all this is secondhand," she says, snapping shut one of the five new books about her. "The performance's time is art. You have to be in the place where things happen. Then it really makes sense. If the performance has some kind of element of transformation...and then if it's bad, it's bad and you leave. But if it's not bad, it's really good and you never forget it in your life."

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